


From East to West

by Filomena



Category: Dead Poets Society
Genre: Angst, Escapism, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Oregon - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 04:35:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16509485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filomena/pseuds/Filomena
Summary: Todd remembers things. He doesn't want to, though. All he wants is for the mist and fog to erase his face, erode it, until he no longer recognizes himself.





	From East to West

Todd remembers things. He doesn't want to, though. All he wants is for the mist and fog to erase his face, erode it, until he no longer recognizes himself.

The West Coast does wonders to him. He walks with the confidence of a man who is already gone; his head isn't bowed nearly all the time, and his shoulders aren’t as hunched. Sometimes he brings his fingers to his lips and prays to the god of boats and fishermen. Melted clouds in the grey sky strike fear in him, because they form faces in the wake of nostalgia.

He sees Charlie, and occasionally Meeks. And then Neil. Whenever he sees Neil, he turns his head away, and then begs for forgiveness from the actual God.

-

Neil shows up one day, in his hotel closet. "How's it going?" He's wearing the smile he wore when the curtains closed.

Todd slams the door shut. He hopes his jacket doesn't get possessed.

-

It's 1959 again, and they're both in a closet. The darkness soaks into their skin, to which they respond with eagerness. More is to be found in black than white.

"Hey," Neil says. That's it. A simple _hey_ , and then he places his delicate actor's hands on both sides of Todd's face, his fingers fusing into Todd’s skin and bones.

Todd sighs, closing his eyes. He bumps foreheads with Neil, feeling the blood pulse into their capillaries and young, dumb hearts. "I could write poetry right now. About all of this," he whispers. He's never said such a thing before. What is Neil turning him into?

Neil laughs. Todd feels the rumble in his very marrow, and it rattles its way into the earth. "Really?" He sounds giddy.

The air he exhales blows over Todd's lips, and he moves back unexpectedly.

"Yeah."

It's so affectionate that Todd wants to puke. Or melt until Neil picks him up and carries him to the heavens, and god, that's the cheesiest thing he's ever thought of. His face heats up, and Neil rubs his thumbs over his cheeks.

"Why're you heating up?" Neil lets his hands fall to his lap.

Todd bluffs, saying, "We're in a closet. Why are we in a closet?"

"So they don't hear us."

Todd sucks in a breath. "God, Neil, don't say stuff like that–"

Neil laughs. "You should hear yourself, you're so scandalized–"

"But it's not funny! What if we get caught?"

Neil grins so widely it hurts his face. "That's why we're in a closet!"

-

Neil’s red lips are everywhere, dotted on store signs with blonde beaus and in the plush leather purses of glass windows. Spilled red paint shines on a sidewalk like blood, and Todd skips around it.

The sky is red. The grass is red, and his eyes are red and bloodshot from hearing Neil’s voice when he sleeps. Last night, he gripped his sheets so hard his knuckles went white. Each of his bones, attempting to leap out of his body and from the endless duress, twitched and convulsed.

He ignored every temptation to let go, because he didn’t know if he would be able to latch back on again.

Noticing that his shoe has been tracking red paint for several metres, he clicks his tongue and then stops himself. What does it matter? He’s a dead man. He’s come here to give himself some semblance of life, even though the people slog and slumber through the day.

And then he sees a helenium, off the beaten path and into a lot near a store. The window faces the unused grass, god knows why (Todd supposes God even wonders why the people of the West Coast exist in the way they do). People wave their hands about like plankton in the water, throwing back coffee or donuts at the same time. All are preoccupied with their mundanity, and Todd wonders if this is all humans ever were.

He takes a step towards the window, the heleniums billowing and swelling up. No one turns their head, no one gapes. So he continues, reaching the cluster of flowers, picking up an especially swell one out of the bunch.

The atmospheric pressure increases around him, grief building onto his head and chest exponentially. He never did mourn Neil properly. On the day of the funeral, which he wasn’t invited to (for Mr. Perry thought Neil’s friends were akin to the devil, having seduced him to his seemingly untimely death), he laid on his bed and looked at the bumps on his popcorn ceiling until his father yelled at him.

Perhaps reincarnation existed. Perhaps Neil had all of his beautiful fucking bones turned into cellular walls that used the sun to survive.

Todd stares at the flower in his hand. It could be Neil, hell, it probably is Neil, because only a flower with that level of exuberance would look so happy in the West Coast.

Unrequited love looms over his head, even though it was requited. Todd brings the flower to his lips in apology, and feels the warmth of human skin and school issued soap for the most split of seconds. Sunlight warms on his back, and he fools himself into thinking that there are arms wrapped around him.

He opens his eyes to nothing. The sunlight was a myth, dark clouds hanging over him like a guillotine. His head cranes to see the restaurant goers, and there is no difference. They gesture at things in the air and run their mouths like machines.

Todd glances at the flower in his hands, still swelling and curling over his hand. He walks out of the old, abandoned grass lot, hand gripping the stem like he once gripped Neil’s.

-

Todd steals a glass from room service and fills it with the tap water from his sink. Placing the flower in the glass, he watches it spin around before settling, the petals leaning over the rim.

He touches it gently. And then he lets it rest, because everything good in this world needs a break from others.

-

The flower wilts slightly. As Todd leans to move it further into his desk, he knocks the glass over. It reaches the ground with a shatter that permeates all thoughts, and he scrambles to gather the pieces.

He breathes through his nose. The sight is harrowing to him, for some reason; the flower’s corpse is sitting in a halo of splintered glass and water, which is already soaking the hardwood and the surrounding rugs.

Picking up the individual pieces, he throws each one away until he feels his skin split and a warmness drip all over his palms.

Red. Red on the stem and then shining over the remaining glass pieces, just like the paint on the sidewalk. He is made of it. Each day his capillaries blush and his heart pumps this cursed red, and each day he walks through Oregon in an effort to see colour.

This isn’t what he wanted. His body is a fountain for everything he wishes he could exterminate. The waterworks of his mind recycle the pain he exhales, and he has no place to put it.

He drops his hand to his side, blood be damned. The ground becomes slippery, and his hand twitches and careens with the liquid underneath it. He steadies his breathing, for suddenly it has increased tenfold, and then the room is disappearing into a spiral of dark brown dressers and white dress shirts.

“Todd?” A distant voice. Neil’s voice.

Todd looks over, chest heaving(how did this happen? Why does he make these things happen?). He faces nothing but the open door of his closet. Neil is gone, turned into dust and then dirt for other Neils to be buried in.

His eyes well up. He brings his bloody hands to his lap, seeing the gash that is lined with red and now bits of minuscule, broken glass.

He can’t keep them still. He also can’t erase the history behind them, no matter how hard he tries. So he lets his eyes pool and spill tears over his chin, because he realizes that this is the first time he’s mourned Neil’s death after a year of pretending he had never met him.

-

The practicing doctor eyes Todd’s palm. “You did a number, didn’t you?”

Todd hadn’t cleaned his hotel room. Instead, he left a housekeeping notice on his doorknob, and hoped that he wouldn’t be charged extra for the coagulation of blood and glass.

He slept with the flower, as ridiculous as he thinks it is. Holding the wilted, blood soaked thing to his white dress shirt, it stained it in large streaks.

The doctor takes Todd’s hands in his own, beginning to pick the glass bits out with tweezers. “Did you get into a fight?” He asks. There’s curiosity tinged in his voice, because Todd looks like the last person on earth to bust open beer bottles in dingy bars.

Todd looks over at the window. All he sees are platitudes of grey. “I knocked over a vase,” he mumbles. He woke up to oxidized blood and a half closed wound.

“Did you try gluing it back together?”

“Something like that.”

The med student, Todd’s assuming, because most doctors are weary and battered, smiles wryly. “Did you flunk art class?”

Todd looks at him. Brown eyes, dark hair. A face that blurs and only focuses on his lips. “We never did sculpting,” he says, “just pencil to paper.”

The med student hums and looks down, continuing to pick meticulously at the glass.

Todd opens his mouth and then closes it. Should he say something? Or should he let this encounter die just like all of them?

“I-” he stutters. What he executed in his mind, the smooth transition of thoughts to words, collapses before his very eyes. But he continues, because for some reason, Oregon has rebuilt him from his very foundations. “I did stab myself once.”

The med student looks up in surprise. “How the hell did you manage that?”

Todd’s lips perk upwards for the first time in months, making his face hurt. “It’s a long story.”

-

“So you write?” The med student says. His name is Greg, and out of his white lab coat he wears a woollen sweater under a fall jacket.

Todd stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Mostly poetry.”

The walk in silence until Greg mumbles, “People never valued poetry enough.”

Todd looks at him in surprise. Most people would scoff at him for investing his time in anything but the sciences. “Do you write?”

“No,” Greg says, “I used to draw. But I’ve always wanted to write.”

“Used to?”

Greg looks at the lifting and settling clouds around them. “Don’t have time anymore, what with med school.”

A chasm opens under Todd’s feet, and his eyes try to trace the cracks in the sidewalk to bring him back to reality. “Did you ever want to be an artist?” He asks, because he wants to know what he’s plunging into beforehand. Repeating Neil again just might kill him.

Greg’s lips press into a line. “Nope,” he says, in the least convincing way possible, “Always wanted to be a doctor.”

Todd looks away, and into the gaps in between buildings. “Doesn’t-” he stutters, his nerves spreading icily through his body, “doesn’t the gore bother you?”

“You get used to it.” Greg stays silent for a while, before adding on, “Say, why didn’t you come to the clinic earlier? You already had a scab forming.”

“It was late at night when the vase broke. I fell asleep trying to fix it,” Todd replies quickly. He could never lie properly. If Greg can hide his true thoughts and intentions, so can Todd.

-

Todd ambles through Oregon’s streets and makes room to talk to Greg. His notebooks lie barefaced, empty from before Neil’s funeral. He had thrown his last one out in disgust, because the feeling of lovesickness and infatuation leached through his bones and reminded him of things he would never feel again.

He hadn’t bothered to tell any of the members of his whereabouts, nor his parents or his brother. His bags were packed at midnight, and he boarded the bus as if it was his first time.

What is life to him? To stare at empty lines and a pen full of dried ink in presumptuous coffee shops?

Sometimes, the feeling of restlessness overcomes him. Time makes a fool and a watch out of him, ticking whenever it pleases.

-

“Stay still.” Greg has a toothpick in the crook of his teeth, and a polaroid balanced between his dainty doctor’s hands.

Todd exhales in a slight snort. “You look like a rogue with that toothpick. Or a greaser.”

Greg looks over the camera at Todd in indignation. “Watch it, stiff.”

Todd sighs. “Why are we doing this?” He’s sitting down on a sofa, sunlight pouring into every crevice in his face. His eyes are squinted from being overloaded with white, blinding light.

“It’s for this photography contest. I could win a ton of money. And I want to pay off my loans without relying on my old man.”

“But why me? Couldn’t you have told one of those swooning girls that I always see around you?”

Greg raises his eyebrows, or at least it seems he does over the camera. “Hey, you make girls swoon too.” He adjusts the positioning, clicking his tongue. “Have you never seen how they act around you?”

Todd turns from the window to look at him. He thinks he sees Greg’s eyes widen, his finger hovering over a button. “What do you mean? I’ve never noticed.”

Greg snaps the photo, the picture coming out in pitch black. He takes it out and waves it hurriedly, exclaiming, “Aha!”

Todd looks at him expectedly.

Greg smiles ear to ear, but what the smile is directed at is a mystery. “They titter about you. Talk about your doe eyes.”

Todd splutters. “What? What are you talking about?” The compliment is completely unexpected, something he’s never received without it being backhanded. It was always, “Oh, his eyes are almost like Jeff’s!”, or “Pity, his hair isn’t as light as his brother’s.”

He learned to shut everything out after those incidents.

“You…” Greg studies Todd, trying to find the right words. “You’ve got a face that’s perfectly feminine and masculine.”

He puts the camera down. “You kind of look like a poet’s muse. Like - “ he waves his finger in the air, twirling it as he orders his thoughts together. “Like Walt Whitman’s.”

Todd freezes over, because damn him, all he thinks about is dancing around Welton with Neil shouting the same thing after him. He threw out his poetry that day, crumpling it into balls of paper, and he’ll throw it out again if he needs to.

Greg’s voice, uncharacteristically uncertain, breaks through the silence that Todd has instilled. “Todd?” He asks, his voice petering out into the empty air.

Todd snaps out of his hellish reverie, his head shooting out of his hand. Before he knows it, he’s gathered his coat and hauled his body halfway out the door.

His cursed timidness is coming back. The real Todd didn’t die at all, not in Oregon, not ever. He grapples at all straws of happiness and consumes it whole, cheeks splitting with blood and flesh. “T - thanks. For the good time.” The words come out meekly, hesitantly. They will always be that way. He will never be like Jeff.

Todd leaves Greg with his hands clasped around the polaroid like the holy grail. He walks through Oregon fog pathetically, his head bowed and his shoulders concaving by the second. When he makes it back to his room, he finds it as clean and as orderly as it was before, with no receipt in sight.

He crawls into bed, shoes and coat and all.

-

_We are men of complexities,_ Todd writes. He scratches it out, head swimming with overexertion, his forehead clammy yet hot.

The streets of Oregon have had no effect on him. He goes to the same diner every day, poking miserably at his food and staring out the window. His hands convulse over forks, which seem to glare back at him, and he thinks the air is burning holes in his chest with every intake of breath.

Todd’s tired. He’s never truly rested, what with his constant nature of acting as if everything will electrocute him at any moment. By staying on edge, he is protected. But each joule of energy he uses is drained in his composure, which is sapped of strength or gracefulness.

He had learned that even gracefulness is a carefully concealed act. To hold up bones and muscle with fervour and fluidity is just as draining as tensing every muscle in constant flight. Neil could rarely ever get Todd’s shoulders to turn lax and loose.

Todd mutters curses under his breath. He slams his notebook shut, asking God to smite him or burn him as easily as a piece of paper would. Nothing happens, because he probably looks so pitiful, staring up at the ceiling as if plotting his escape.

“What do I do?” He asks, letting his fingers trail hot lines over his cheeks and jaw. His muse is gone from this world, and god is dead. He exhales sharply, closing his eyes.

The piers. Todd never did visit the piers, unwittingly choosing the winding roads and sidewalks as a way to reincarnate his mind.

He turns to grab his coat, and then realizes that last night’s avoidance led to his clothes being permanently crushed beyond ironing. Yet he carries on out the door anyways, because a desperate man will do anything to find the illusions that give him solace.

Cowlicks stick up in his hair, which he absentmindedly combs through with his fingers. Today is a new day, he thinks. Today is the day he finds what he’s been missing for the past fourteen months.

Todd reaches outside on possibly the worst day of his stay, the wind cutting into his cheeks and lips. He takes a moment to savour the pain, savour the synapses that make him Todd Anderson. And then he runs, thanking the god of Oregon’s citizens for making the roads blissfully empty, all the way to the piers.

A bench lies in front of the roiling and tumultuous waters, which are stained grey by the sky above.

“A storm’s coming,” Neil says softly, his words as delicate as the wind that brushes against Todd’s ears. He ends up beside him as they both sit, long arms draping over Todd’s shoulders and the rest of the bench.

“I know,” Todd replies. He tries to make his voice as earnest as possible, as if to communicate every emotion he’s withheld for what seems like a millennium. His voice shakes, even though he’s managed to hide every tremor away from the unsuspecting.

Neil looks at him, and Todd can feel it in his very bones. He turns to look back, but is met with empty air and the dark brown of the bench.

Fingers trace his lips. They dot on the apples of his cheeks, turning him into a male Venus, and summarize his jawline into a fluid motion, as if it was never Todd’s before Neil touched it.

Todd sits in this, basks in it like a dog sleeping in the sun, and simply breathes. He thinks of Greg and doe eyes and God, his hands resting in his lap. They come together when Neil begins to slip away, nudging his apparition of a head on Todd’s shoulder. Todd sighs in response. “Strange how the roles have changed,” he mumbles, refusing to turn his head to the impending nothingness beside him.

Instead, he looks at the sky. He thinks he sees Neil’s smile as a crescent of light between the flat, uniformly dark clouds, watching it fade away until it is sewn into the matter of the universe.

The wind whips around Todd’s navy blue overcoat, and he pulls a dark red scarf out of his pocket to drape around his head.

When the fat droplets of rain begin to dot the concrete in front of him, he lets it wash over him. The water travels in rivulets down his spine and chin. He treats it like rebirth.

**Author's Note:**

> this took weeks to make, bc my inspo only happens at 1am and school is a bitch. hope you guys enjoyed this! it's the longest short(haha get it) i've ever written.
> 
> big thanks to @jay_somnia for helping me edit this bad boy. check her stuff out, it's amazing.
> 
> lastly, i have wattpad(@keloidal) where i keep all of my poetry(some of it's 4 years old!) and other original work. 
> 
> have a great day/night!
> 
> (also, forgive me if i got stuff about Oregon wrong)


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